Musk Engineers

Fricker grew increasingly frustrated by the engineering team the Musk led - specifically its unwillingness to deliver even preliminary widgets.

To X.com's engineers, the work wasn't "incomplete" so much as progress."

Programming, like writing, was halting and uncertain- less paint-by-numbers than most appreciated.

"It's not linear, and you might burn three hours going this way, and you go, aw, shit, and you don't wan to tell someone you went down the blind alley," Ho said.

But those blind alleys mattered: Musk learned that start-up success wasn't just about dreaming up the right ideas as much as discovering and then rapidly discarding the wrong ones.

"You start off with an idea, and that idea is mostly wrong. And then you adapt that idea and keep refining it and you listen to criticism and then engage in sort of a recursive self improvement… keep iterating on a loop that says, ‘Am I doing something useful for other people? Because that’s what a company is supposed to do.”

𝑹𝒖𝒅𝒚𝒂𝒓𝒅 𝑲𝒊𝒑𝒍𝒊𝒏𝒈, 𝑰𝒇

“…If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs…

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting…

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you…

If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim…

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it.”